Here’s what it’s like to run the Ridge Racer course for 20 hours

(My Switch says it's been 10+ hours, but I feel like it's been 40+. This could just be the time dilation of practice.)

Like I've said, I’ve been really stuck on this year’s release of Ridge Racer in the Arcade Archives series. It’s probably my most-played Switch 2 game at this point, and as of this writing I am among the top 50 players on the time trial leader board. One car, one track. I’ve been perfecting it for months. When a game sticks on me, it really sticks.

Why Ridge Racer? (aren’t you a Sega man?)

I actually do have a lot of hours in Virtua Racing on Switch and even the old Daytona USA port on 360/PS3, I just never got as far up the leaderboard as I did in this game. My old Joycons started drifting too, making my upgrade to a Switch 2 a perfect time to get back to classic arcade racing.

Why not the PS1 version? That’s the same, right?

It’s actually not! At the time the PR line was that PS1 games were exactly like having the arcade at home, but that’s just not true of what was arguably the flagship title of the PS1 launch. The arcade version was on the System 22 arcade board (it was the later System 11 that was PS1-based) and the PS1 version doesn’t look nearly as good. It also adds faster playable cars, so time attacking it is completely different. PS1 Ridge Racer has been re-released over and over again, but the Arcade Archives port is the first time the original arcade release has been ported to consoles.

(There is always emulation, but something seems very off to me about the MAME Ridge Racer videos I’ve watched.)

Anyway, that first arcade release of Ridge Racer has the kind of arcade purity I’m looking for. Like I said, one car, one track. Learn to drive the course, execute, repeat. Time Trial, the game’s final challenge, makes things even more straightforward by eliminating all rival cars but one. Even when you know exactly what you have to do, it’s a feat of skill and concentration to knock out those perfect three laps in a row.

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The rules

I practice the Time Trial course, effectively the game’s highest difficulty. Ridge Racer has four difficulty modes, each of which raises your car’s maximum speed and one of which exposes a new and more difficult section of the course. Time Trial and Advanced are the same course, but Time Trial clears the road of all but one rival and makes your car faster, which in turn makes key parts of the course more difficult.

In short, hug the inside of the track, give yourself room to turn into corners, and take advantage of the game's generous drifting mechanic to take curves fast and smooth without drifting too hard and losing speed unnecessarily. But if you didn't catch that, a turn-by-turn guide follows.

I make no promises that the way I run this course is the absolute fastest and best plan, cause it's not. But I am also top 50 on the leaderboards, so I think I’m probably on to something.

The course

As the announcer counts down and the race queen struts by, you might be looking for your view change button to pull the camera out of the driver’s seat and behind your car. Well, there is none: in this first version of Ridge Racer you drive from a car’s eye view or nothing. If you’re not used to driving this way in games, it’ll take some time to imagine the space around you and learn exactly how much space there is between your camera and the wall. Sometimes you’ll be wrong. Sometimes I cut a turn too close and hit a wall I didn’t think was there.

Unlike most other arcade racing games, this game wants you to hit the accelerator the moment the race announcer says “GO!”, and no sooner. Hit it early and your engine will stall while your rival speeds off, and the announcer will have a laugh at you about it. Get it right and he’ll say that’s “just what I wanted to see~!” As a rule, if the announcer praises you after a turn, that means you nailed it. “You must be one genius of a driver, you’ve gotta teach me~!”

Once you’re off you hit a wide city straightaway: note the huge screen that replays your run from a TV-camera distance and displays your lap time. It’s the kind of detail that blew minds back in the early 90s, a touch that indicates this game is the actual future.

Anyway, the first and most obvious racing principle is to stick to the inside of the track, which is naturally the shortest distance. When you’re going for a time trial record, that means sticking as close as you can to the inside wall without actually hitting it. I like to imagine it with a scene from Initial D, where Takumi hugs the edge of the road so tight that one of his car's tires is actually spinning in the gutter between the road and the mountain’s edge. (You can actually do this in the ID racing games.) I try to think of that tire in my head, “locking” it up against the wall without touching.

In a few seconds you’ll enter the yellow-lit tunnel, another technical “wow” moment in a game that is half tech demo. Ridge Racer does not waste time with its course design, and gets the player right down to sights they could never see in 16-bit 2D. As you continue to hug the wall here, you’ll make an easy turn right into a blocked-off section and plow through the warning signs that were meant to keep you off it. At the end of the tunnel you’ll want to shift left to get ready for the upcoming corner.

One of the ways Ridge Racer manages difficulty is to limit the player’s maximum speed. Novice mode is a gentle Sunday drive, and there you would stroll effortlessly through this turn at full throttle. But at the speed you’re driving in Time Trial, it’s going to require a little finesse.

The basics of cornering, to be brief: start on the outside to give yourself room to turn, then slow down and turn wide into the inside of the curve until you’ve reached its apex, the exact middle point, and then punch the accelerator to leave the turn running.

In a realistic game we might slow down before we take the turn, but in Ridge Racer it goes like this. On this turn we’re going to let go of the gas for a moment and turn simultaneously. Once we’ve slowed down enough— that’s something you’re going to have to feel out yourself— punch the gas and go. We’re looking for a smooth, controlled turn with a minimum of speed lost. If the tires squeal, you’ve overdone it. We need to drop just enough speed that we can run through the next turn without decelerating.

Most of this course should be run at close to top speed; you really don’t need to slow down much. I play automatic transmission in this game, because manual doesn’t have a higher top speed and there is rarely a need to go under top gear anyway.

Exiting this turn you’re going to want to push to the right lane to set up for the long left turn over the bridge, coming up immediately. Position yourself correctly and you shouldn’t need to slow down at all during this turn: get it a little bit wrong and you have a run-ending collision with the wall coming. If I feel myself getting too close, I let go of the gas for a micro-second.

Again, hug the right wall briefly as you drive uphill. When you hit the peak of the hill and a sign becomes visible, move left to the middle of the road. Turn hard to the right and you should get through this curve cleanly. You don’t have clean visibility here, so you just have to trust your placement and timing.

The next turn looks like you're supposed to drift really wide and hit the outside of the road, but that's too slow. Get in the left/middle of the road and turn hard, only momentarily letting up on the gas. You should be able to get through this one fast.

This leads immediately into an S-curve. The fastest way through an S-curve is a straight line, so position yourself to pass straight through the middle. If you’re actually turning all the way through these curves rather than shifting gently, you’re doing it wrong and losing time.

Exit towards the left to take on the first truly tough corner on the course: the only one the announcer will actually warn you about, because if you don't slow down here you will crash.

This turn calls for a slightly longer drift than the one you took on the first turn. A little bit after the sign, let go of the gas and start turning in. When you’re close to the center of the curve (and yes, the mountain wall), punch the accelerator and you’ll drift nicely out of the turn. You can either drift this too hard, drop a lot of speed, and hear your wheels spin out, or you can pass through smoothly with a just-right drift. To give you an idea, I go from top speed to about 210 km/h when I take this turn perfectly. It’ll take a lot of practice and a firm idea of exactly how long to stay off the pedal to get consistent with this turn.

On the next straightaway, you have a speed bump to contend with. Don’t hug the inside (left) wall here or you’ll be in trouble when you land. Give yourself a little distance from the wall and take the jump, keeping the car straight for the duration. You don’t want to hit the ground skidding.

Once you land, there’s a long, high-speed left turn through a tunnel that leads into the next section of the course. The Novice and Intermediate courses have this section cut off and simply loop after the tunnel, but Advanced and TT unlock a tough (and noticeably, completely generic with no decorations or scenery) section that really tests your driving technique. By the same inside-track principle, you want to cut as tight a path as possible through the long left: remember, the shortest path is best.

Once you have entered the advanced section of the track you’re going to make a quick left— keep to the left lane as well— before a deceptive 90-degree right turn. You’re going to zip through this one with a mini-drift. Turn and let go of the gas for only the briefest moment before hitting the gas again, putting you through the sharp turn with barely any speed lost. Two turns afterwards can be taken at full speed easily.

Next up is a big hairpin turn, the longest and sharpest on the course and the only spot in the whole game where you actually have to slow down significantly. The same principle applies here as to the other big turns, but it’s a much longer drift. You should hit the gas at around 190 km/h. You’re going to skid here, so don’t worry about it and do your best to steady the car for the coming series of curves.

You enter a tight double S-curve here, easily the hardest part of the course and something that takes a lot of practice to come to terms with. You need to go through at full throttle, but positioning yourself incorrectly will slam you into a wall. When you come out of the first turn, it’s possible to position yourself so that the coming S-curve is basically just a straight line, like the one you slipped through earlier in the course. But you have to pull right after that to avoid hitting the wall.

It’s tough! I recommend using the Arcade Archives port’s save states to practice this part rather than playing full laps over and over again, like I did before I noticed the port had save states.

The next two turns are easy and to be taken at full throttle: it’s what follows them that is some trouble. In TT you’re going to hit a small sharp turn, then another speed bump, immediately before a big turn. You want to position yourself before you hit the bump, land with your wheels straight, and then take that long turn.

And that is it for the course: all that’s left to do is to take that long straightaway to the finish line, hugging the right wall as you do so. Now do it three times in a row, as the tension mounts with each repetition.

My best lap is about 1’09”, and I’m struggling to pull it off three times in a row in a single run. (This would put me in the top ten players: the best player has a completely insane time like 3'25".) If you’re not shooting for world records or anything, I think 1’12” or so is about the point at which you’ve mastered the course, and the rest is just shaving off time.

This turned out a bit like when I wrote up Rondo of Blood, huh? Just like then, I didn't expect the final product to come out nearly this long. The hardest part was definitely screen-shotting from an arcade game that only has cockpit view on the Switch. As such, I dunno how great those shots of the turns came out, but they're about all I can do. Sorry!